“Organizations have plenty of toolkits to choose from as they evaluate private cloud, but they require multiple tools that users must string together themselves,” said James Pang, Vice President Product Management for Platform. “What’s more, these toolkits can cost $50,000 or more, and require 30-plus days of onsite consulting to build and customize an evaluation environment. We wanted to provide a cheap and easy way for users to get up and running quickly with a single product."

Software and best practices

The ISF Starter Pack, which costs $4,995, includes software, best practices advice and help to set up private cloud and includes:

The companies will work with integration services provider MomentumSI to deliver on this enterprise-ready platform that relies on cloud computing, integrating infrastructure for private and hybrid clouds with enterprise IT self-service, and system automation.

No cloud-in-a-box

From my perspective, cloud solutions won’t come in a box, nor are traditional internal IT technologies and skills apt to seamlessly spin up mission-ready cloud services. Neither are cloud providers so far able to provide custom or "shrink-wrapped" offerings that conform to a specific enterprise’s situation and needs. That leaves a practical void, and therefore an opportunity, in the market.

This trio of companies is betting that self-service private and hybrid cloud computing demand will continue to surge as companies press IT departments to deliver on-demand infrastructure services readily available from public clouds like Amazon EC2. Since many IT organizations aren’t ready to make the leap, they don’t have the infrastructure or process maturity to transition to the public cloud. That’s where the new solution comes in.

Incidentally, you should soon expect similar cloud starter packages of technology and services, including SaaS management capabilities, from a variety of vendors and partnerships. Indeed, next week's VWworld conference should be rife with such news.

Here’s how the newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus Systems collaboration looks under the hood. newScale, which provides self-service IT storefronts, brings its e-commerce ordering experience to the table. newScale’s software lets IT run on-demand provisioning, enforce policy-based controls, manage lifecycle workloads and track usage for billing.

rPath will chip in its automating system development and maintenance technologies. With rPath in the mix, the platform can automate system construction, maintenance, and on-demand image generation for deployment across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

This trio of companies is betting that self-service private and hybrid cloud computing demand will continue to surge

For its part, Eucalyptus Systems, an open source private cloud software developer, will offer infrastructure software that helps organizations deploy massively scalable private and hybrid cloud computing environments securely. MomentumSI comes in on the back end to deliver the solution.

It's hard to imagine that full private and/or hybrid clouds are fully ready from any singe single vendor. And who would want that, and the inherent risk of lock-in, a one-stop cloud shop would entail? Best-of-breed and open source components work just as well for cloud as for traditional IT infrastructure approaches. Server, storage and network virtualization may make the ecosystem approach even more practical and cost-efficient for private clouds. Pervasive and complete management and governance are the real keys.

My take is that ecosystem-based solutions then are the first, best way that many organizations will likely actually use and deploy cloud services. The technology value triumvirate of newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus—with solution practice experience of MomentumSI—is an excellent example of the ecosystem approach most likely to become the way that private cloud models actually work for enterprises for the next few years.